Parshat Beshalach5 min read

The Oleander Tree at Marah and the Bread Kept Since Creation

Moses writes God's Name on poisonous oleander and throws it into bitter water. Weeks later, heaven drops bread stored there since the first week of creation.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Three Days Without Water
  2. The Bitter Tree That Was Also Poison
  3. Poison Into Healing
  4. The Bread That Had Been Waiting
  5. The Test Built Into the Bread

Three Days Without Water

The song at the sea had barely faded when the thirst began.

Three days into the wilderness of Shur and the water bottles were empty. The people who had watched the sea collapse behind them like walls of glass were now scanning the horizon for palm trees, for any smear of green that might mean water. Children were crying. Mouths were dry. The miracle of the sea was exactly three days old and already insufficient against the arithmetic of thirst.

Then they saw Marah. Water. Running water in the desert. People ran toward it.

They tasted it and stopped.

The Bitter Tree That Was Also Poison

The water at Marah was undrinkable. The Torah says so without elaboration. The name Marah means bitter, as if the place had always known what it was.

The people turned to Moses with the question that extreme disappointment produces: what are we going to drink? Moses turned to God and received an instruction. God showed him a tree. Moses cut it and threw it into the water and the water became sweet.

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan refuses to leave the tree unidentified. The tree was Ardiphne, oleander, one of the most poisonous plants in the region. It is not a plant that sweetens things. Its sap and leaves and bark and flowers are all toxic. An animal that eats a single branch can die from it. Moses was shown the most bitter, most dangerous tree in the area and was told to throw it into already undrinkable water.

But before he threw it in, he wrote on it. The Targum says Moses wrote the great and glorious Name, the Ineffable Name, on the oleander, and then cast it into the water. The Name did not cancel bitterness by adding sweetness. It transformed the whole structure of what bitterness could do.

Poison Into Healing

The logic the Targum proposes is severe. God did not show Moses a sweet herb to counteract the bitter water. He showed Moses the most bitter thing available, marked it with the Name, and made it the instrument of transformation. Bitterness canceling bitterness. Poison becoming the mechanism by which poison is overcome.

At Marah, the Targum also records that God gave the people statutes and ordinances, teaching that the bitterness of the water was not only a practical problem but a test. They had been freed from Egypt. They had crossed the sea. Now the wilderness would teach them whether they could trust God's provision even when the first available water tasted like failure.

The Bread That Had Been Waiting

Six weeks into the wilderness, the people were hungry again. The food they had carried from Egypt was finished. They looked back at the fleshpots of Egypt with a longing that freedom had not cured. They said to Moses and Aaron: at least in Egypt we had bread to eat. Here you have brought us out to kill this whole community with hunger.

God heard the complaint and answered with something Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus calls the bread that was laid up for you from the beginning of the world.

Not new bread. Old bread. Bread that had existed since before the wilderness, since before Egypt, since before the people who needed it had been born. The manna that fell each morning in the desert of Sin had been prepared in the first week of creation and stored in the highest heavens, waiting for the morning when Israel would need it.

The Test Built Into the Bread

God told Moses that the manna would fall each day, and the people should gather only what they needed for that day. On the sixth day, a double portion would fall. On the seventh day, nothing would come, because it was Shabbat. The bread itself was structured to teach Israel how to count time the way God counted time.

The test in the manna was not whether Israel could gather bread. It was whether Israel could refrain from gathering extra, whether they could trust that tomorrow's portion would also fall, whether they could rest on the seventh day knowing that the bread had already been provided and did not require their labor to continue existing.

Most of them failed the test at least once. They gathered extra on a weekday and it rotted. They went out on Shabbat looking for manna and found nothing. The bread that had been waiting since the beginning of creation required Israel to become a people capable of receiving it, which took the whole forty years.

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From the tradition

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The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 15:25Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

At Marah, where the water was too bitter to drink, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan tells us what the Hebrew only hints at. Moses prayed, and the Lord showed him the bitter tree of Ardiphne, and he wrote upon it the great and glorious Name, and cast it into the midst of the waters, and the waters were rendered sweet.

The Ardiphne is the oleander, a tree whose sap is poisonous and whose name in Aramaic already carries the taste of bitterness. The Targumist is making a pointed observation: the remedy for the bitter water was not a sweet tree. It was a bitter tree, inscribed with the Name.

Think about the logic. If you wanted to sweeten water, you would throw in honey, or dates, or sugar cane. You would not throw in oleander. The Targum is saying that the transformation happened not through the addition of sweetness but through the writing of the Shem ha-Meforash, the Explicit Name of God. The bitterness of the tree was irrelevant. The Name did the work.

The Targum then adds that at Marah, the Word of the Lord gave Israel three statutes: the ordinance of the Sabbath, the statute of honoring father and mother, and the laws of civil damages. Three commandments, before Sinai. The Sages located these three at Marah because the Hebrew says God set for them a statute and an ordinance there.

The Maggid draws the parallel. The bitter tree sweetened the water because the Name was on it. The bitter wilderness was sweetened for Israel because the first commandments were given in it. Both transformations work the same way. Bitterness plus Torah equals sweetness. Bitterness alone equals death.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 16:4Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

When the grumbling began in the wilderness of Sin, the Holy One responded not with rebuke but with a test. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 16:4) renders it: Behold, I will cause the bread which hath been laid up for you from the beginning to descend from heaven; and the people shall go out and gather the matter of a day by the day, that I may try them whether they will keep the commandments of My law or not.

Two striking additions from the Targum. First: the bread which hath been laid up for you from the beginning. The manna was not improvised in response to hunger. According to the Sages, it was one of the ten things created at twilight on the eve of the first Sabbath (see Mishnah Avot 5:6, compiled c. 200 CE), already waiting in heaven since creation. The grumbling triggered the delivery, but the provision had been there all along.

Second: the Targum tells us plainly that the daily rhythm was a test. That I may try them whether they will keep the commandments of My law or not. Not a test of their hunger, but a test of their discipline. Would they gather only what was needed? Would they trust that tomorrow's portion would come tomorrow? Would they rest on the seventh day and trust the double portion of the sixth?

The Maggid pauses on the word trial. A trial is not punishment. A trial is a weighing. The Holy One wanted to know what they were made of, and more importantly, they needed to know. Egypt had trained them to worry about tomorrow's bricks. Sinai was coming, and Sinai required a people who could receive a day's portion without hoarding.

Takeaway: sometimes the purpose of a daily limit is not to frustrate you but to retrain you. Manna in daily doses is a school for the kind of soul that can later receive Torah in daily doses.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 16:15Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

The word manna itself, as Targum Pseudo-Jonathan tells it, was born from a question. The sons of Israel looked at the fine frost on the desert floor and said to one another Man Hu?, "What is it?"

This is the Hebrew pun the Torah itself records. The Targumist preserves the exchange but adds Moses's answer with unusual care: It is the bread which hath been laid up for you from the beginning in the heavens on high, and now the Lord will give it you to eat.

The phrase laid up from the beginning is the Targum's signature. We saw it in the previous chapter, and here it returns with emphasis. The manna was not a fresh production. It was a stored gift, set aside at creation, now being issued.

Think about what it must have felt like to be told this. You are hungry. You are grumbling. You are regretting Egypt. And Moses tells you that the bread on the ground has been waiting for you since the first Sabbath of creation. You are not improvising your way through the wilderness. You are eating what was reserved for you before the world had your name.

The Maggid finds in this a teaching about providence. The Hebrew word for providence, hashgachah, carries a double sense: watching over, and also provisioning ahead. The Holy One does not only watch. He also packs. When you finally need it, whatever it is, the provision has often been in the warehouse for longer than you have been alive.

Takeaway: the thing you did not know to ask for may already be stored up for you. The question Man Hu? is the start of every Jewish prayer of discovery. What is this? It is what was waiting.

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Midrash Tanchuma Buber, Beshalach 18:2Midrash Tanchuma Buber, Beshalach

Another interpretation of (Exodus 15:25) "And the LORD showed him a tree." And what was it? Rabbi Joshua says: it was an olive tree. Rabbi Nehemiah says: a tree of willow. And some say: the roots of a fig. And some say: the roots of a pomegranate, for there is nothing as bitter as these. And the Sages say: it was the harduphani tree, and there is nothing as bitter as it.

Rabbi Ishmael the son of Rabbi Yohanan ben Beroka said: See how great are the miracles of the Holy One, blessed be He! Flesh and blood heal the bitter with the sweet, but the Holy One, blessed be He, heals the bitter with the bitter, as it is said (Jeremiah 30:17): "For [I will bring healing to you] and from your wounds I will heal you, says the LORD." With that by which He strikes, He heals. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses that he should put a bitter thing into a bitter thing, in order to make it sweet thereby.

Similarly it is written (II Kings 2:21): "And he went out to the spring of water, and cast salt there, and so on, and he said: Thus says the LORD, I have healed these waters." Similarly (Isaiah 38:21): "And Isaiah said: Let them take a cake of figs, and so on." And is it not so that when they place the sap of figs upon the flesh, immediately it is eaten away? Rather, it was in order to perform a miracle.

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